


A Man Made of Mud, Muscle and Blood

by butyoumight



Category: Kamen Rider Ex-Aid
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Graphic Description, Medical Procedures, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-12
Updated: 2016-12-12
Packaged: 2018-09-08 00:24:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8822284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butyoumight/pseuds/butyoumight
Summary: Born one morning, drizzling rain. Fighting and trouble are my middle name. If you see me coming, better step aside. Lot of men didn't- lot of men died. 
Hanaya Taiga died in 2013, and then things got complicated.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ngeonger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ngeonger/gifts).



> This is my first year participating in Yuletide, and so I tried to do my best with my recipient's requests. Of course, there had only been two, I think, episodes of Ex-Aid when I signed up, so I hadn't even _offered_ to write Ex-Aid, but I'm glad I got paired with ngeonger all the same, because they requested Hanaya Taiga focus fic, and I've spent the past few weeks watching Ex-Aid with a series of horrifying Hanaya-focused headcanons that I probably wouldn't have bothered to write if not for their prompt, so! 
> 
> Title and summary flavor text are paraphrased from the song "Sixteen Tons" by Merle Travis, popularized by both Tennessee Ernie Ford and Johnny Cash. 
> 
> Reitierating on the warning tags from above, but this fic features pretty graphically described medical procedures, particularly focused on the action of a post-mortem autopsy- and how that would effect someone who is later resurrected. 
> 
> I hope this is at least sort of like something you were hoping for, ngeonger! Happy Yuletide! <3

**OCT 26 2016, 22:43**

 

All the lights were off when Taiga returned to the building. He still thought of it as his offices, even though it was also technically his home and his lab. Even though it was technically an abandoned building, the title held in limbo because the man who owned it had died without leaving behind family or any kind of will or testament. 

 

He didn’t bother turning on any of the lights as he made his way through the building. He knows every turn of every hallway like the back of his hand, and he doesn’t need to see to know where he’s going. Which is for the best, because his eyes are closed anyway. He stumbling a bit, occasionally pausing to lean, or press one hand to a wall to keep his balance.

 

Whoever that black Ex-Aid was, he was strong. Taiga hadn’t taken so much damage, been so close to Game Over, since getting this new Driver from Dan at GENM. He hadn’t known what kind of damage it would cause, inside the suit. 

 

The back-most office was also where Taiga kept his clothes, and more importantly, his sewing kit. He paused in the doorway, leaning against the jamb and taking a few shaky breaths. He pressed one hand to the center of his chest where the pain was worst. He mostly wore dark shirts now for this exact reason, because when he brought his hand up to turn on the lights, he left a smear of thick dark blood on the switch. 

 

He stumbled deeper into the room, grabbing up his kit as he went. It had everything he needed in it. Suture needles and holders, heavy surgical-grade nylon line. Even antiseptic, though he wasn’t sure if he _could_ catch any infection at this point. 

 

Perching on a stool and opening his kit on his desk, he reached up to turn on another light, this one a surgical flood light that shone down over his immediate vicinity. Now he could see stains of blood showing even through his black shirt. That amount of saturation would be pretty impossible to get out without leaving a stain, which marked the shirt as a lost cause. That was good, because he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get it off over his head in this state without causing more damage. 

 

He used a scalpel from the kit to nick the collar of the shirt down past the seam, then tore the rest of the shirt down the center, reflecting wryly that if he’d been wearing his scrubs today, it would have saved him a shirt. 

 

With the shirt parted to either side of his chest, he carefully shrugged first one then the other arm out, and then craned his neck to examine his own wound. If it could really count as a wound.

 

The incision started at each shoulder, just above and to either side of his collarbones. Cutting down at a forty-five degree angle to meet just above his sternum, where another straight incision went straight down his stomach to the top of his pelvis, curving slightly around his navel. A classic Y-shaped autopsy incision. 

 

The attack from the black Ex-Aid had caused a number of the sutures from the last time Taiga had sewn himself up to split or tear. Especially at the crux of the incision, where three cuts met. Keeping that part together, right over his breastbone, had proven to be the hardest part of this situation. He had to keep developing new ways to sew those three triangles of skin together. 

 

The blood that had seeped out was darker than a healthy human’s blood should be. It was only getting darker. He frowned at it, shook his head, and then cleaned away what he could before going at the worst parts of the open incision with his antiseptic wash. He counted how many sutures he thought he’d need for this job, then threaded the appropriate number of needles to save himself the trouble of having to stop and re-thread part of the way through. 

 

That done, he reached into the top drawer of his desk and drew out a short length of leather cord. That went between his teeth, something for him to bite down on. Picking up the first needle, he settled in to start the incredibly unpleasant task of sewing himself shut. 

 

_You’re just a walking corpse._ Graphite’s taunt rang in his ears, echoed inside his head as he worked. 

 

Twenty relatively neat sutures later, Taiga stood up and stretched tentatively. The stitches held, and he went about cleaning up after himself, remembering to clean off the light switch by the door as well. It wasn’t any good to leave the place looking like a murder scene. 

 

_Let me lay you to rest._

 

Taiga switched off all of the lights before collapsing face-down on his bed. It wasn’t unmade, but it wasn’t as if he got cold. Colder, anyway. 

 

“Not yet.” He muttered into the pillow. Tonight was definitely one of those nights where he’d need to sleep. “I’m not done yet.” 

 

**JUN 14 2013, 09:54**

 

Kiriya slowed down as he actually took the time to read his paperwork for the day. It wasn’t every day he saw a name he recognized on his orders. In fact, it wasn’t very often at _all_ that he saw a name he recognized on his orders, even though he was the only licensed forensic pathologist at Seito. It was a big hospital, but that meant there were less fully trained examiners to do the average sorts of autopsies. It wasn’t huge on the violent or unexplained deaths, which was mostly what Kiriya got.

 

At least, it hadn’t been two years ago. Kiriya’s workload had definitely increased in the past year or so. He wasn’t complaining or anything, but he did find it curious how many more strange deaths were happening. Not strange in execution - mostly it was a lot of people being beaten to death. The sort of thing that Kiriya could figure out. It was the _why_ that was starting to drive him crazy. Seito wasn’t a violent city… Or it hadn’t been. 

 

So seeing a name he knew, that gave him a moment of pause. Especially because the orders for this examination had been issued by the hospital itself, not the city. There was Director Kagami’s stamp, right there at the bottom. 

 

He was sure he knew the name Hanaya Taiga. He was _pretty_ sure he was a colleague, which would explain why the hospital wanted to know how he’d died before the city bothered asking. Except... He’d thought Hanaya Taiga had left the hospital... A little under two years ago. 

 

Curiouser and curiouser, Kiriya reflected as he washed his hands, pulled on gloves, and backed into the autopsy room. 

 

Sure enough, as he turned down the sheet, Kiriya recognized the face there. Even pale and sunken, there was something plenty familiar about the simple flat bowl-shaped haircut and the formation of moles and freckles across his nose and cheeks. He closed his eyes to think for a moment, and the pieces slotted back into place. 

 

Radiology. He had worked in radiology, and not as a specialist either. He had one of those reputations as being a jack-of-all-trades type, only he wasn’t the master-of-none that usually goes with it. He was genuinely good at everything to do in the department. Though, Kiriya seemed to remember that he had a reputation for having a pretty bland bedside manner that kept him back in the labs. He seemed to communicate better with the machines than with the patients. 

 

So, what had happened? Kiriya continued to dig through his own memory even as he did a preliminary examination of Hanaya’s body. Pretty typical stuff - he reported the progression of lividity and rigor to his recorder, estimating he was less than twenty hours post-mortem. The autopsy orders hadn’t mentioned where he’d been found, either, which Kiriya did think was maybe a bit odd, but not unheard of. 

 

Two years ago, then. Had Hanaya been missing shifts? Was that why Kiriya remembered him? He thought that might have been how it started. And then about nineteen months ago, at least, Hanaya had left the hospital in his shirtsleeves, after a pretty loud argument with the Director. No one knew what the argument had been about, just that there had been shouting. 

 

Kiriya rubbed his lip with the butt of his scalpel, then sighed and leaned in to begin his incision. The freckles that marked Hanaya’s face continued down his chest, and it was no easy feat to ignore that many prominent spots. His hand wanted to reflexively trace and connect them. He restrained the impulse. He could be a bit lazy sometimes, but he was still a professional. 

 

Now, of course, as he reached the pubis and pulled Hanaya’s skin back, he remembered. Hanaya hadn’t just left the hospital - He’d been fired. He’d had his license revoked. It had been a big deal within the hospital, though not the kind of scandal that sometimes drew outside attention. He’d made some error, some malpractice, someone had died. Probably _not_ someone that Kiriya had autopsied, or he would have remembered a lot sooner and clearer. At least, he hoped so. 

 

So, now, almost two years later, Hanaya Taiga was dead, and his former hospital was really interested in knowing how he’d died. The thing was, he was already a curious case, because there was no hint of bruising or broken bones that had been typical of the other unusual deaths he’d been dealing with for the past little while. 

 

Other than being dead, Hanaya Taiga was untouched, undamaged. None of his organs showed hint of damage _or_ disease. There was no internal bleeding, no indication of organ failure. There were signs of an extreme bilateral pneumothorax, collapsed lungs. But without any other damage or any indication of complicating factors, it just shouldn’t be possible. His heart was contracted, mid-pump, which wasn’t necessarily unusual in cases of sudden death, but it was also something that _was_ unusual considering the lack of other apparent causes. It was like his lungs and heart just stopped working properly by force of will - which was _definitely_ not possible. He took samples of each of Hanaya’s organs anyway, because maybe there was something toxicology could tell him. 

 

He reported his findings, or lack thereof, as he replaced Hanaya’s organs, pushed his ribs back together, and started sewing the incision shut with wide, neat stitches. It gave him time to think, even if Hanaya was destined for cremation, which Kiriya thought likely. 

 

His mind wandered off again as he moved around to the head of the table. Cranial autopsies were not his favorite thing, but the confusing circumstances inside Hanaya’s trunk led him to want to see if there was anything obviously wrong with the brain. He doubted it, considering the lack of damage to the head and body in general, but it was worth taking a glance, anyway. He made his cuts smoothly, two incisions about ten centimeters long above each ear, connected with a long incision over the crown. Peeling the scalp back in two large flaps left the skull exposed, and it was time for the bone saw. Kiriya preferred a zig-zag at the back of the skull over the notch at the front he’d learned in school. Either way, it was just to make it easier to slot the top of the skull back on when he was done. 

 

Sure enough, as he removed the cap of bone, there was nothing apparently wrong with Hanaya’s brain. Brains were delicate organs, so damage to them was usually pretty obvious. There was no blood pooling in the back of the skull, no evidence of clots that would indicate a stroke. Not even any kind of minor scarring that could maybe sort of _start_ to explain why Hanaya’s body had just spontaneously stopped moving air and pumping blood simultaneously with no outside cause. 

 

He placed the top of the skull back where it belonged, replaced the scalp to its natural configuration, and used the same wide stitches to close the incision as he reported the further lack of implications in the cranium. 

 

In the end, he reported his best guess at cause of death as a combination of pulmonary and myocardial infarctions, leaving it an undetermined death. He made sure to recommend the tox screens and finished up with his verbal signature before tapping the floor switch of the recorder and pulling the sheet back up to cover Hanaya’s face. 

 

He didn’t have a problem with death - forensic pathologists couldn’t get far in the field if corpses made them edgy. But there was something about this particular case that was getting Kiriya’s back up. Maybe it was something about the expression death had left carved into Hanaya’s face. Not the usual sort of pained grimace, but a sad resignation. Maybe it was a suicide after all, but Kiriya would really like to know how a person could commit suicide without leaving any marks on themselves at _all_. 

 

Hanaya went into one of the fridges, and Kiriya peeled his gloves off, tossing them casually into the biohazard bin on his way out. Not for the first time, he wished he could just submit his recording in place of doing all the paperwork, but Seito was meticulous. He had to do the hard copies, as well as the recording. He was going to need a snack for that. 

 

He shut the lights off in the morgue as he left. The doors locked themselves. 

 

The locks flicked open, and the morgue door opened just a crack. Just enough to let the slim form of Dan Kuroto in. Slipping the tactfully borrowed keycard into the breast pocket of his blazer, he stepped down the hallway as though he knew exactly where he was going.

 

Which, technically, he did. Even in the dark. Maybe especially in the dark. 

 

It was chilly in the autopsy room, the product of twenty or more body-sized refrigerators running all at the same time. Dan approached the drawer that had Hanaya Taiga’s name on the tag. He pulled it open, and his lips curled in a not-entirely-friendly smile that certainly didn’t soften his eyes. He tugged the sheet down off his head, and scanned the planes of the cold, waxy face. 

 

“I’m really sorry about this, Hanaya-sensei.” He said softly, reaching into the pocket of his slacks and drawing out a small device - somewhere between a video game cartridge and an asthma inhaler. “But we’re not quite done with you, yet.” He placed two fingers on Hanaya’s chin and pushed carefully but firmly down. Rigor mortis resisted the push, but eventually there was a twist and a crack and Hanaya’s jaw dropped as his stiffened tendons gave up. 

 

Dan placed the device between Hanaya’s teeth, and pushed his jaw back up, locking the thing between his teeth before he tapped a button on the outside. 

 

The device lit up, made a whirring sound, and seemed to dispense… Something, into Hanaya’s mouth and down his esophagus and trachea. 

 

Nodding, Dan removed the device from between Hanaya’s teeth with a bit less caution than he had used to place it. It got tossed into the same biohazard bin Kiriya had disposed of his gloves in, though it only sat amongst the refuse for a few moments before it disintegrated. By then, Dan was already walking out of the morgue, out of the building. 

 

Ten minutes later, Hanaya Taiga sat up with a deep gasping breath. 

 

**NOV 21 2016, 20:04**

 

These new Bugsters, the ones powered up with the stolen Gashats, they were uncommonly strong. Taiga was pretty sure of that, mainly because he wasn’t ready to admit that maybe they weren’t any more strong. That maybe he was getting weaker. 

 

He didn’t have time to worry about that. He didn’t have time for much of anything, when it came down to it. He had a mission, a duty, and he’d be damned if he’d let these damn monsters beat him again. He was either going to fight until he got all ten Gashats and stopped their pointless infestation in its tracks, or he’d fight until he literally fell apart. After all, he’d already fought to the death. 

 

More and more, in quiet moments when he let his mind wander, he was afraid that falling apart was the more likely of the two options.

 

He stumbled as he approached the front entrance of his office, and spent a moment leaning against the doorjamb and just breathing. He tugged at the zip in the front of his scrubs and spread his hand over the oozing incision. He didn’t think any of the sutures had torn or split this time, but repeated exertion without cleaning it up between fights was starting to become an issue. 

 

It didn’t quite occur to him to be concerned about the door being open until he was already half-way down the hall to the back lab. He turned to look over his shoulder with a frown. The lock wasn’t broken, so it probably wasn’t Graphite. 

 

_Probably._ It might be Graphite’s… What, friend? Comrade? Brother, even? Who knew, with the Bugster. Who cared?

 

There was a light on in the back lab. So, almost definitely not Graphite, who could see in the dark. Still, Taiga slowed down, taking silent steps closer and closer to the open doorway. 

 

Inside the lab, the young pediatrics intern was standing with his back to the door. His hands were carefully in his coat pockets, like he was trying to make a point of having not picked through any of Taiga’s things. And it was casual enough that Taiga believed he wasn’t just putting on a show.

 

What was his name? He’d heard Poppy Pipopapo use it before, he was sure… Emu, maybe? 

 

“What are you doing here?” He snapped, but it came out a lot more feeble than he’d intended. In the harsh light of his surgical flood, the only light the intern had turned on, he could see his own hand, painted garish and dark red-brown. The incision was hardly visible from the amount of congealed blood covering him from sternum to navel. 

 

“I have some questions for you,” The boy said as he turned around, but his words tapered off as his mouth fell open. “Oh, oh no, what _happened_?”

 

**JUNE 13 2013, 23:12**

 

Taiga turned his head when he heard the bell indicating the front door of the clinic was opening. He thought he’d locked it, but maybe not. It had been a long day, after all, with a lot of patients. 

 

He still thought of them as patients, even though he hadn’t technically been a doctor for a couple of years. It was just a habit, he guessed. All he did was a lot of cursory examinations, suggestions for holistic treatment, and if necessary, a referral to a licensed physician. He always referred them to Seito. They may not have parted on great terms, but it was still the best hospital in the city.

 

Still, being kind of a rogue practitioner at least meant he got to choose his own hours, and when he locked the doors of the clinic, that meant he was done seeing patients. Theoretically.

 

He stood up and headed out towards the main entrance. “Hello? We’re closed up for the evening.”

 

Taiga had to do a lot more interacting with patients directly, when he was working for himself. He knew he’d had a reputation at Seito for being kind of cold and not very good with patients. He thought he might be getting a bit better now, two years after leaving the strict confines of the hospital and the stress of balancing his duties to radiology with his duties to the CR. “If you have an emergency, I should really call an ambulance…” 

 

“Hello?” He called again as he stepped into the waiting area in the front of the clinic. The door was hanging open, and he took a step back when he realized the door’s lock was broken, the dead-bolt splintered off. 

 

No human could do that. 

 

“Hey, quack.” The voice came from behind him, and Hanaya just barely managed to keep himself from jumping, from showing the fear that was now skittering up his spine. He recognized the voice, not just from its sound and tone, but from the electronic distortion. As if fed through a broken synthesizer. 

 

“Graphite.” He said in response, fighting to keep his voice even. 

 

There wasn’t much in this world that frightened Hanaya Taiga, but this monster did. He’d never forget watching the beast tear itself out of his patient. A patient he failed to save. _The_ patient he’d failed to save. Not just as a Doctor, but as a Kamen Rider. 

 

“Is it even legal, what you’re doing here?” Graphite asked. Taunting, trying to make Taiga respond, react. Attack. 

 

He knew he was going to, just as much as he knew how badly it was probably going to end. He hadn’t had the Driver in nearly two years. He hadn’t seen much by way of the Bugster in that time, but it seemed that his past had caught up with him at last. 

 

“What does a monster like you care about human laws?” Hanaya turned slowly as he asked the question, pulling his hands from his pockets. If an attack was coming, he wanted to be able to at least try to defend himself. 

 

Graphite’s laugh was like the screech of a modem. He gave off a subtle glow in the dark of the closed clinic, like a computer monitor receiving power but no signal. 

 

“Probably more than you’ll ever know.” Graphite sneered. 

 

“Well, not that you really care, but yes, everything I do here is perfectly legal.” Taiga tried to project more confidence than he really felt. He knew he wasn’t fooling Graphite, though, and he found himself taking a step back, away from the monster, towards the open door. 

 

Where would he go, though? That thought occurred to him as he took yet another step, retreating without trying to look like he was retreating. This clinic was also his home, where he lived and slept and ate. After losing the patient, losing the Driver, and losing his license, this building was all he had left to his name. 

 

Plus… He knew no one else had been trained with the Rider equipment. If he led Graphite to the hospital, or to a police station, what would anyone else do? Who else had the technology, the equipment to fight a monster like this? 

 

No one. He knew that. 

 

“What do you want, Graphite?” He put as much vitriol into these words as he could, hoping to mask his nerves. 

 

Graphite took another step nearer to him, and this time Taiga held his ground. The open door was at his back now. It occurred to him that he wasn’t sure if Graphite had any fully manifested comrades. 

 

“I’m here to finish what I started two years ago.” Graphite said with another laugh. “But let me tell you something good, before I finish you off for good.” 

 

Taiga put one hand on the doorframe, his fingers curling around the splintered end of the deadbolt lock. “And what’s that?”

 

Graphite’s eyes gave a flash. Inhuman, like the rest of him. “You’re just the beginning. After you comes the old man. Then the terminal housing that infernal girl. Soon enough, there’ll be no one left.” 

 

Taiga knew what he meant. Graphite’s plan, maybe the plan of the entire Bugster race, was to destroy everyone who knew about them. To attack CR directly, get rid of all the evidence and all the weapons capable of hurting them.

 

He didn’t wait for any more of Graphite’s taunting. He didn’t worry about whether there were more Bugsters waiting for him in the street. He simply turned tail and, against all of his pride, he _ran_. 

 

He didn’t notice if Graphite was bothering to chase him. His goal was the hospital. He had to warn them- Director Kagami and Poppy Pipopapo were in danger, and while they hadn’t been his responsibility in two years... The rest of the world still was. His responsibility - _everyone’s_ responsibility. 

 

The main hospital building was within view when he slowed down, breathing hard and feeling sick and only now letting himself wonder whether Graphite was right behind him, whether the Director was even at the hospital this late, if Graphite had been lying...

 

But he had to try. He had to warn them. The top edge of the hospital’s roof was in sight. He was going to make it. 

 

“Good bye, Kamen Rider.” Graphite’s voice was just behind and beside him. He hadn’t heard the monster’s approach - he wondered if Graphite even bothered to run, or if he had just teleported. “Die knowing you failed.” 

 

Graphite’s clawed hand landed on his shoulder. Taiga stiffened, his back arching, his throat closing. He couldn’t breathe, his heart slowed... Whatever Graphite was doing, it was fast and effective. 

 

Hanaya Taiga’s body hit the ground and was still. 

 

**NOV 21 2016, 20:07**

 

Taiga snapped the front of his scrubs closed with one hand, put the other hand in his pocket to hide the worst of the blood staining, and then regarded the intern with a stony scowl. 

 

“What are you doing here?” He asked again, but the intern was clearly not to be deterred. He stepped closer, reaching right past Taiga’s shoulder to turn on the overhead lights. 

 

“You’re injured. Your head...” The boy reached up, and Taiga tried to twist away, but his balance was thrown off and he couldn’t quite manage it before the boy had recklessly pushed his fingers into Taiga’s hair on the left side. 

 

When he pulled his hand back, it was streaked with the same congealed blood that was even now soaking into the front of Taiga’s scrubs enough to show through. 

 

“Damn.” Taiga muttered under his breath. He hadn’t realized he’d taken such a hit to the head, enough to split his incision open. He pushed away from the door jamb and went right to the cabinet that held his kit. There was a mirror hanging on the inside of the cabinet door and he peered into it. Sure enough, nearly the entire patch of white in his hair was stuck together in stringy clumps and stained a brownish red. 

 

_What a pain in the ass_ , he thought to himself. He wasn’t capable of doing proper sutures on his own head, and since the first time the original stitches had come undone he’d had to make do with liquid bandage and occasionally a few butterfly closures, if the split got particularly bad. 

 

“What’s... What’s wrong with you?” The boy’s voice was shaky behind him, and he turned to look as the boy stared at his hand, his eyes wide and dark with what looked an awful lot like fear. Taiga knew the expression well, he had had to spend nearly a year training it off his own face. Though, the whole thing had taken a lot of his other expressions with it. 

 

“Wash your damn hand.” Taiga snapped at him, jerking his head at the sink. The boy practically jumped out of his shoes and then scurried to obey. 

 

Taiga sighed, and turned his back on him again as the water started. A quick examination showed him that his chest wasn’t actually doing so bad, he just needed to clean it up and maybe do a few sutures - three or four in the middle, as usual. He really had to do something about the deterioration of the skin the center of the incision. A graft, maybe. 

 

The split on his head was going to be a lot more difficult to handle. And on top of it all, he had this intern to deal with. 

 

The water turned off, and a moment later Taiga felt the boy at his shoulder. Looking over at him, he saw the same sort of serious glint in his eyes that the boy often got right before he transformed. But this wasn’t a game, and Taiga thought they both knew that.

 

The boy pulled a pair of latex gloves out of his pocket and held them up. “You don’t have an allergy, do you?”

 

Taiga stared at him blankly for a moment. “What are you doing?”

 

The boy blinked back, obviously confused by the question. “I’m helping you.” 

 

**JUN 14 2013, 12:33**

 

His hands were shaking. His whole _body_ was shaking. He could _hear_ his heels drumming against the bare metal he was lying on. Why was he lying on bare metal? He lifted both hands and pressed them to his chest, to his face, to his head. 

 

Everything _hurt_ , as the shivering and trembling started to subside it was just replaced by a dull ache. Deep in his gut, the crown of his head. Everything was throbbing, everything except the one thing that should be throbbing. Sure enough, as he pressed both hands firmly to the sides of his own neck, hard enough to still the fine tremors in his fingers, he felt... He felt no pulse. 

 

_Calm down, Taiga. Think._ He told himself firmly, and pressed both hands down firmly against the metal. Flexing his legs, he managed to press his legs down too, and stop the shaking for a moment. 

 

He still felt chilled in a truly abnormal way. He’d never felt this cold in his life, he was quite sure of that. Cold through, it gave new meaning to the phrase ‘chilled to the bone’. 

 

_Where are you, Taiga._ He pushed himself mentally, and blinked a few times, looking around. Okay, so he was in the morgue. Possibly the morgue at Seito, though most morgues looked pretty much the same, so it was anyone’s guess. 

 

That was when he took the time to look down and consider his position. That explained the truly ridiculous chill, he was sitting up on a gurney that had clearly been rolled out of the freezer, which had been left open. The room was distinctly even colder than morgues usually were for this exact reason. He shifted a bit, and it was _then _that he realized that he was naked. That realization came part and parcel with the awareness of the roughly stitched Y-incision on his chest.__

__

__It was about then that Taiga fell off the gurney and scrambled backwards into the wall, as if he could maybe back away far enough and fast enough to leave the damning incision behind._ _

__

__Of course not, and he slumped to the floor for a moment, taking several deep breaths. The longer he spent awake and concentrating on his breathing, the more natural it felt. He hadn’t realized it at the time, but his first few breaths upon waking had been more difficult than was strictly healthy._ _

__

__He closed his eyes, took a few more breaths, and pulled his knees to his chest. Pointedly ignoring the scratch of the rough thread against his bare thighs, he tucked his head down on his arms and tried to remember... Anything._ _

__

___Graphite_ , the name came to him in a flash, and then a sort of frenzied memory of running through the streets. From his office, towards Seito. Graphite had threatened to kill him, to kill the Director and everyone else who knew about the Bugster. He’d been trying to warn them._ _

__

__And Graphite must have caught up with him and killed him. Just like he said he was going to, just like he should have done two years before, on that rainy rooftop._ _

__

__All of which did nothing to explain what he was doing naked and alone in a morgue with what was pretty damn obviously an autopsy incision on his chest and... Sure enough, with a tentative hand he found evidence of another on his scalp, this one the classic H used for a cranial autopsy._ _

__

__He was dead, he was certainly dead, he _had_ to be dead. He’d failed, Graphite had caught him, and he was absolutely without a doubt _dead_. _ _

__

__So what was he doing awake?_ _

__

__**NOV 21 2016, 20:25** _ _

__

__Taiga did his best to relax, which wasn’t easy. This whole situation was completely and totally opposed to everything he’d trained and taught himself for the past three years, everything that _had_ to be done. For secrecy, for the sake of himself and his patients. _ _

__

__He actually stretched out on the examination table, though he insisted on letting his legs hang off the end in case he needed to jump up quickly. Emu didn’t seem to care, he simply rolled Taiga’s discarded shirt up into a little pillow and used it to prop his head up and more fully into the glaring light of the surgical lamp._ _

__

__Taiga kept his eyes open, though the light was stabbing and bordering on painful. He had to hold the intern accountable for what he was doing. Emu had insisted on helping, and he hadn’t insisted on any answers or explanations yet, but Taiga knew it was only a matter of time._ _

__

__“You must have taken a pretty nasty blow to the head.” Emu said, keeping his tone conversationally light._ _

__

__“Uh-huh.” Taiga grunted between gritted teeth. Emu was cleaning the incision thoroughly, and it was far from painless. Still, he wasn’t about to give him the benefit of showing weakness._ _

__

__“You should really be anesthetized for this.” He continued, gesturing idly at the suturing needles he’d prepared precisely to Taiga’s instructions._ _

__

__“I don’t have anything strong enough.” He admitted, and then immediately berated himself for being coaxed into a false sense of security._ _

__

__Emu didn’t grab onto that thread of information and pull, which Taiga found equal parts relieving and annoying. What was the boy going to expect from him, after this? He didn’t _want_ help, he’d been doing just fine without help for three years. Relying on others was exactly how he ended up here - an angry corpse with a vendetta. Maybe he was a ghost, and he just had unfinished business, but he’d thought that if he were a ghost, he should at least have the benefit of being incorporeal. _ _

__

__“Just hand me that.” He pointed to his braid of leather and Emu picked it up and looked at it with a pinched look on his face, like he was tasting something unbearably sour._ _

__

__“Are these teeth marks?”_ _

__

__“Very clever. Maybe you should be in the morgue instead of pediatrics.”_ _

__

__“Ha ha.” Emu held the leather out to him, but he didn’t let go of the end even when Taiga tried to snatch it away from him. “Seriously, this is how you manage your pain?”_ _

__

__“Not that it’s _any_ of your business, but it’s how I manage the noise.” _ _

__

__That statement might as well have been a brick right between Emu’s eyes with the way he winced. “That’s really barbaric.”_ _

__

__“Thank you for pointing that out.” Taiga sighed. “Look, are you going to help me? Because you could just leave. In fact, I’d prefer that.”_ _

__

__Emu’s expression shifted to the serious, dangerous one again. The one he got when he pulled out his Gashat and prepared to transform. “I’m going to help you.” He snapped, stepping forward to shove Taiga back into a lying position._ _

__

__“And what do you want in return?” Taiga growled up at him, glad that they were at least finally being honest with each other._ _

__

__“I want you to shut up so I can do this without tearing your head open even more.”_ _

__

__Taiga blinked, then sneered. “I meant once you’re done.”_ _

__

__Emu spread his hands, then picked up one of the suture needles. Taiga bent his leather into a loop and bit down hard in preparation. Emu leaned in, and began to close the incision with what felt like extremely precise sutures._ _

__

__“Once I’m done, maybe you’ll trust me a little more. Maybe a few weeks from now, the next time you get beat up, you’ll let me help you again. And maybe, a few weeks after that, _maybe_ you’ll start to understand that we’re on the same side.” Emu sighed. “You want to destroy the Bugster, I get that. Well, so do I. We want the same thing. We don’t have anything to compete over.”_ _

__

__Taiga gritted his teeth into his leather, wanting to contradict him, but also not particularly wanting to scream in his face as another suture was pulled taut._ _

__

__“Maybe someday you’ll even tell me about what happened to you to make you like this.” Emu continued, his voice dropping from a terse cadence to a more conversational tone. “But I don’t have to know _that_ to know that whether it’s just to defeat them, or just to heal the patients and prevent an epidemic, we want the same thing. Probably you want the same thing as Hiiro-san, too, even though he’ll probably never admit it.” _ _

__

__Taiga let a snort escape his nose, and then winced a bit as Emu pulled another suture tight._ _

__

__“There.” Emu stepped away from the table. “That’s your head taken care of, anyway. Can I take a look at your chest now?”_ _

__

__Taiga disengaged his teeth from his leather strap and looked over at the intern with a scowl. “Yeah.” There was no real reason to refuse him at this point. “I guess you may as well. Just, since you’re here.”_ _

__

__The crease between Emu’s eyebrows finally relaxed, and he smiled. Taiga had to admit the expression was comforting. The kid was, after all, the same age Taiga had been when he’d been tapped to become Snipe._ _

__

__“Good.” Emu turned his back, taking off his gloves and going to wash his hands. “Thank you,” He shot over his shoulder, “Hanaya-sensei.”_ _

**Author's Note:**

> It's worth noting that, aside from the whole 'dead body brought back to life' thing, I've taken some creative license with some of the medical procedures presented in this fic. I reasearched everything I could and tried to present much of it as accurately as I could, but for the sake of the fiction, some of the procedures are not entirely accurate from a contemporary medical standpoint. 
> 
> Then again, we're talking about Kamen Rider here, so I hope you can excuse the fact that Hanaya didn't lose his brain to formaldehyde, which is in fact the actual standard operating procedure for cranial autopsies. 
> 
> Anyway, other than that, I hope you enjoyed the fic!


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